Conventional mobile telecommunications devices such as telephone handsets have been designed primarily for speech calls and have only a limited capability for handling data. Recommendations have been developed to provide a wireless application protocol (WAP) to promote common standards and specifications for data services that operate over wireless communication networks. WAP enabled telephone handsets have been developed which allow the user to access remote servers. Data content is provided in a mark up language, similar to conventional hyper text mark up language (HTML) known as a wireless mark up language (WML), which is configured to allow a page of HTML data to be displayed as a deck of individual cards which are of the size suited for display on the relatively small display screen usually available on a mobile device such as a cellular telephone handset or personal digital assistant (PDA).
The data is supplied by WML servers at individual network addresses, with a homepage that act as an entry point to a particular site together with further pages or decks with individual addresses that can be navigated by the user. To this end, the mobile device is provided with a browser to display the data.
A WML server can be accessed by dialling an individual telephone number associated with a WAP gateway which acts as a proxy server between the WML server itself and the mobile device, which acts as the client.
Newer, faster data services for mobile communication devices have been developed, including I-Mode, GPRS and UMTS which operate in a generally similar way, with the mobile device acting as client to remote servers, and a browser to display the accessed data on the mobile device. The browser that is used for mobile telecommunications devices is conventionally known as a microbrowser, which is controlled by keys on the mobile device. Instead of using a mouse-driven cursor, a focus region is provided, which can be navigated around the display by keys that may include a scrolling key on the mobile device. The keys may be so-called soft keys that can be pre-programmed to perform different functions depending on the display provided by the browser. Conventionally, one of the soft keys allows the user to move backwards through previously visited network addresses. Also, a bookmark list may be stored so that individual network addresses can be readily accessed.
However, where a bookmark list contains a large number of entries, the procedure of scrolling through the list to locate a particular network address may be laborious and time-consuming. As the use of such services is likely to rise in the future and the allowed number of entries stored in a typical browser bookmark list increases, perhaps to over 100 entries, locating the desired address may become difficult, even with the use of folders or a searching function.